The Turin law school project on the information revolution

The project

The starting point of this project on law and technology has to do with a basic fact: whereas, over the past centuries, human societies have used information and communication technology (“ICT”), but have been mainly dependent on technologies that revolve around energy and basic resources, today’s societies are increasingly dependent on ICT and moreover, on information as a vital resource. The processing of well formed and meaningful data is not only reshaping essential functions of current societies, such as governmental services, transportation and communication systems, business processes, or energy production and distribution networks. What is more, the information revolution is affecting our understanding about the world and about ourselves. By insisting on the legal impact of the information revolution, it does not follow, however, that the law cannot regulate the process of technological innovation. On the contrary, the law can conveniently be understood as a technique that regulates other techniques and hence, as a meta-technology which competes with other modalities of regulation, such as the forces of the market or of social norms. In addition, the traditional hard tools of the law, such as statutes and codes supported by the threat of physical sanctions, have increasingly been complemented with more sophisticated forms of enforcement via the mechanisms of design, codes, and architecture. This is the bread and butter of work on the regulatory aspects of technology in such fields as universal usability, informed consent, crime control, social justice, or design-based instruments for implementing social policies. From the viewpoint of the law as a meta-technology that competes with other forms of regulation, we thus assume a bidirectional tension, or interplay, between law and technology. Instead of a one-way movement of social evolution from technology to law, a key component of the legal challenges in an information society concerns the other way around, that is, how the regulatory tools of technology can be exploited by embedding normative constraints into the design of spaces (environmental design), or of objects (product design), or of messages (communication design), so as to comply with the rules of current legal frameworks. On this basis, three different levels of analysis follow as a result, namely (i) the legal impact of technology; (ii) the law conceived as a meta-technology; and, (iii) the field of techno-regulation, or legal regulation by design. More particulary